The End of the '20 - '21 Heating Season

 Just wanted to drop a quick post for record keeping purposes.  We turned on the electric water heater this morning after turning it off on August 31 of 2020.  I would have liked to hold out until June 1st, but two things happened.  The first is that Nancy and I received our Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 vaccination yesterday, and we haven't been feeling too perky today.  Our internal thermostats have been a little wacky, as a result, which brings me to the second thing.  We've had a lot of rain here lately, and the humidity was running very high overnight and this morning.  Thus, the idea of starting a fire for hot water just didn't sound at all appealing today, so we caved.  I don't regret it a bit.  The last thing I want from my wood cookstove is to be enslaved by it, so it was a wise choice.

School will be out after Thursday of this coming week, so I'm hoping to start cooking in the summer kitchen soon.  Look out for future posts centering around the Hayes-Custer!

In Praise of the Margin Gem's Waterfront

Things have been ridiculously busy in our lives over the last several weeks.  School has kept me occupied with both substituting and accompanying the choirs; our church has hired a pastor; after a futile housing hunt we prepared our little house here on the farm for him and his wife to live in; and our church is converting a former doctor's office into our new church building.

You will note from the list above that I haven't done any spring gardening or cleaning, and I didn't even put mowing on the list, though the yard is beginning to look like a jungle.  All of these necessary activities have prevented me from posting very regularly.

Through it all, we've still managed to be firing the Margin Gem on a daily basis.  My goal is to have it heat all of our hot water until the end of May, but we shall see.  Lots of factors play into this, such as how much time I have to keep gathering and cutting fuel, how hot the weather becomes, the levels of humidity indoors and out, whether I can keep enough dry fuel ahead, etc.

Today, though, I just wanted to write a quick post to say how truly impressed I am by the water heating capacity of our Margin Gem system.  In something I read or watched or in a phone conversation with Daniel Fenoff of Stoves and More LLC, where we purchased our Margin Gem back in 2011, I remember him saying that during the summer months they lit a fire in their cookstove each morning in order to cook breakfast.  That fire heated enough water to meet their hot water needs until they had another fire in the evening to cook supper.  

With our schedule as full as it has been, we haven't been doing a lot of cooking.  Last night we had a cold supper, for example, and the night before that, all I made was a dish that my niece calls "Bougie Ramen."  As that involves simply boiling water for three minutes, it was far faster to cook it on the electric stove down in the basement.  Thus, what we've been doing is not starting a fire in the cookstove until just before we go to bed.  Once the fire is well established, I put large chunks of wood in the stove and turn the draft down so that the fire will burn all night.  When we get up in the morning, there is a nice bed of coals that I rake together.  I throw some kindling on this, wait a few minutes after it has caught fire, and throw a few more small pieces in.  This fire is sufficient to fry a couple eggs or make French toast, and it tops off the hot water enough that we can shower and wash dishes in the mornings.

(Note: The above firing method of firing the cookstove can create an unduly large accumulation of creosote in the chimney.  In order to prevent that, I have to use the driest wood that I can find.)

You don't have to have a very hot fire in order to heat quite a bit of water.  I think this is due to the large surface area of the Margin Gem's waterfront.

The interior of the Margin Gem firebox.

In the picture above, you can kind of see the waterfront.  It is the whole left side of the Margin Gem's firebox and measures approximately 16" x 12" which results in about 192 square inches of heat exchanging space.  Coupled with a stone-lined 40-gallon Vaughn range boiler, the heating capacity of this system is impressive, I think.

A picture of the Vaughn range boiler before it
was attached to the Margin Gem.

If I were going to level any complaint against this water system of ours, it would be at the mixing valve which tempers the water as it leaves the tank and goes into the house plumbing.  

Our problematic mixing valve.

Sometimes in the middle of a shower (and perhaps it does this at other times too, but we have no way of knowing) it behaves badly, sending the water from very pleasant to too cold to uncomfortably hot for no apparent reason.  We notice that this happens most frequently when the water in the tank is extremely hot.  I believe this little defect to be the result of the fact that it was damaged by the plumber during installation.  While this is annoying, it hasn't proven to be dangerous, and getting it replaced will not necessarily be expensive, but it will be colossally inconvenient.

The longterm weather forecast is for fairly cool weather, so we'll see how long we can hold out until we switch to electrically heated water for the summer.

Chicken Pot Pie Baked in a Wood Cookstove

This is a picture of an earlier chicken pot pie which
was baked in the Margin Gem; it's not the one you
will see in the photos below.

One thing Nancy and I both love is good chicken pot pie, and we're pretty happy with the version that I make.  Pulling a meat pie out of the oven of a woodburning cookstove gives one a feeling of satisfaction that is a close second to that of a beautifully browned turkey or a golden loaf of bread.

As always with any wood coookstove dish that is going to be baked, the first thing you have to do is to build your fire and heat the oven.  You need a "hot" oven for baking a pot pie, so build your fire so that your oven will run at about 425ºF.

I think the second step to making a really good chicken pot pie is making the right crust, and I'm excited to share the recipe that I use.  It originated from my reprint of the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (Wiley Publishing, Inc. and General Mills, Inc.), and it was labeled "English Pastry."  For a meat pie, especially a chicken pot pie, I think people generally are looking for a thicker, richer crust than one might find on a homemade fruit pie, for example.  As always, I've tweaked the recipe a bit, and now it's exactly what I'm looking for.

The ingredient list for the crust is as follows:

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

2/3 cup butter flavor Crisco

1/2 c. hot water

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

1 egg yolk

1 egg white

1 Tablespoon cold water

Here is what you do:

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together.

2. Measure the butter flavor Crisco and pour the half cup of hot water over it from the teakettle.  Obviously, this will soften the shortening significantly.

3. Add the tablespoon of lemon juice to the shortening/hot water mixture and stir around a little.

4. While stirring the above mixture vigorously, add the egg yolk.  You've got to stir while doing this so that the egg yolk doesn't cook.

5. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry, stirring until no lumps of shortening are visible.

6. Pop the crust mixture into the freezer to chill while you mix and cook the filling.  If you're not going to be assembling this pie immediately, just put the pastry dough into the fridge.

Now, in the pictures that you see below, I used a quart of chicken breast meat that I had canned on the Margin Gem last fall.  When I can chicken, I fill the jar loosely with pieces of meat, and then I fill the jar to an inch from the top with hot water and add a bouillon cube or two.  After the meat has been processed in the pressure canner, the chicken usually condenses down to a little over a pint of meat swimming in about that much broth.

Here is what I did for the filling.  I'm sorry that there aren't any hard and fast measurements for any of this; it is always just by guess and by golly.

7. Drain the quart of canned chicken, putting the broth in a tall-sided frying pan.  I use my Magnalite chicken fryer.  To the broth I added one bouillon cube and a teaspoon of chicken base.  Put that directly over the firebox to come to a good boil.

8. While that was heating, I poured about a 1/2 cup of heavy cream into it along with the juice from a six-ounce can of mushrooms.

9. Add a half teaspoon of paprika, a dash of pepper, and a sprinkling of seasoned salt.

10. I beat about six tablespoons of all-purpose flour into a cup of cold milk until it was smooth.  

11. While stirring the hot mixture constantly, I added the milk and flour mixture. 

12. Once the flour and milk is added, stir constantly with a fork until everything comes to a boil and begins to thicken.  Once that happens, add the canned chicken, the canned mushrooms, a tablespoon of onion flakes, and a cup or two of mixed vegetables.  Bring everything to a boil again, stirring quite frequently.

13. Move the filling mixture as far away from the fire as possible so that it will just simmer very gently while you work on the crust.

14. Whisk the egg white and cold water from the crust ingredients until they're a little frothy on top.

15. Remove the pastry dough from wherever you had it chilling.  Pat 3/4 of the dough into the bottom and up the sides of a deep dish pie pan.  I find that our Pampered Chef deep dish stoneware pie plate is perfect for this.

16. Roll out the remaining pastry dough until it is just large enough to fit over the top of the pie.  I didn't stop quite soon enough in the picture below.

17. Pour the hot filling into the bottom crust, leaving about a half-inch of space at the top so that the pie won't boil over in your oven.

18. Put the top crust on the pie, pinching the edges together to seal.  (I'm embarrassed at the looks of this one as I didn't center the crust right and had to go back and patch it.)

19. Poke holes in the top crust to vent the pie; then brush the egg white/water mixture over the top.

20. Slide the pie into the hot oven and bake for about 25 minutes or until the pastry is a beautiful brown.

I took a picture of the oven thermometer while the pie was in the oven.  If you look closely, you can tell that the thermometer doesn't indicate that the oven is anywhere close to 425ºF, but experience tells me that it is.  If the thermometer on your wood cookstove's oven is not accurate, that doesn't mean that it's not useful.  For example, after almost a decade of baking in the Margin Gem, I don't pay any attention to the numbers on the thermometer.  Instead, it is more helpful to think of the thermometer like a clock face.  If the needle is pointing to 10:00, the oven is at 350º.  Eleven o'clock is 375º; noon is 400º; one o'clock is 425ºF.  If the needle goes past three o'clock, I need to open the oven door! 

After three or four attempts at photographing what the fire looks like in order to maintain a hot oven in the Margin Gem, I settled on this one.

Watch the pie carefully during the last few minutes.  When you're baking at an oven temperature this high, you don't want to let the crust burn.

Doesn't the egg white wash make a nice looking
crust?

I took this picture because I wanted to show that when this crust
is baked in a stone pie plate, it pulls away from the edges once
it's done (as long as you've done a good job of sealing the edges
and none of the filling has boiled down between the crust and
and the pan). You can see it particularly well at the lower left side.

21. After you remove the chicken pot pie from the oven, let it cool for a few minutes before you cut into it.  That will let the filling thicken even more, and it will be easier to neatly remove a piece.  

A piece of the finished chicken pot pie.

We find that this version of chicken pot pie reheats into very tasty leftovers.  In this household, that is a very high recommendation for any recipe!

The picture below is of the pie in the picture at the beginning of this post before it was baked.  I included it to prove that I can actually make a top crust that doesn't have to be patched!

Mrs. Wilbur Heckman's Dumplings

The following recipe is one I copied out of the Anita, Iowa, Centennial Cookbook.  This is a very old-fashioned recipe with a very old-fashioned flavor.  It is too warm for soup, and we have used all of our home-grown potatoes, so I made them the "artificial potatoes" way in the lower half of the recipe.

This is the way the recipe appeared in the cookbook:

Grandma (Mrs. Wilbur) Heckman's Dumplings

(Copied just as she wrote it to her granddaughter)

I used one egg and 1/2 cup of milk, a pinch of salt, about a cup of flour with one teaspoon baking powder, stir good, have your soup broth deep enough to an inch or more above other ingredients and boiling.  Now drop by teaspoonful but have your spoon dipped first in hot broth.  Place lid on for five minutes, or until they look done, or porous on top.  But, don't peek at them until 5 minutes are up.  When we were short of potatoes in the spring, I would feed the family by doubling the recipe, have several inches of salted water boiling and drop by tablespoons in water, let cook, then take those out onto a platter and drop more in.  I would have butter browning with bread crumbs and onions and cover each layer of dumplings with that.

Mighty good!  The boys (she had seven sons) called them artificial potatoes--easy and filling.

Vesta Bailey Duensing

Here is what the dumpling batter looks like when it is all mixed up.  I put perhaps an extra tablespoon of flour in them.

I browned onions and bread crumbs in butter just like she suggested.  If I make these again, I'm going to forego the bread crumbs. They were unnecessary and added kind of a sandy texture to the outside of the dumplings.

I couldn't take a photograph and spoon the dumplings into the boiling water, so you'll have to settle for a picture of what they looked like when I removed the lid after the five minutes of boiling time had elapsed.

I scooped them into a frying pan of hot browned butter and then added the browned onions and bread crumbs.

Once again, Marjorie the Margin Gem is 
desperately in need of a bath!  Poor girl.  She's
always getting her picture snapped when she's
not at her best.

The dumplings were faintly like boiled potatoes, and they certainly weren't bad.  I ate them with a lettuce and cabbage salad and hamburgers that I had canned last summer on the Hayes-Custer.

In these days of heightened awareness about carbohydrate consumption, I don't suppose these will enjoy renewed popularity.  However, back in the day when farming involved constant physical labor, you can see where these little balls of energy would be welcome on the noon dinner plate if the potato bin was empty.

Great Majestic Ranges

I want to share another fun piece of cookstove media from my collection.  The scans below are from an oversized booklet showing the ranges which were being manufactured by the Majestic Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, Missouri, in the late 1910s.  Because of the size of the pages, I had a difficult time getting full-sized scans.

As with so much of the wood cookstove ephemera I have, no publishing date is present anywhere in the booklet.  Thus, we use various clues to arrive at an approximate date, and the first clues appear on the front cover.

The woman's hairstyle in the photograph above screams 1915-1919.  The style of her blouse also is appropriate for that time period.

Our next clue comes from the inside cover, which states that the Great Majestic Range is "The Range with a Reputation" because it won a gold medal, the highest award given at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California.  More commonly known as the San Francisco World's Fair, this event opened on February 20, 1915, and did not close until December 4 of that same year.

Another indicator of the date is the fact that none of the stoves in the booklet have any porcelain enamel on them.  As I understand it, the capability of using porcelain enamel on stoves was developed right around the turn of the twentieth century, but it wasn't until the 1920s that it became widely popular.

The Majestic Manufacturing Company, sometimes called the Majestic Stove Company, produced about two million ranges between the 1880s and the 1940s and was one of the ten largest stove producers in the United States prior to World War II.  Many of their ranges are still in use today, and they are very commonly found in stove restoration shops.

The section about malleable iron on the above page is interesting.  It touts the superiority of malleable iron over cast iron, saying in part that the life of a Majestic Range is three or four times as long as an all casti-iron range.  I would be interested to hear what modern-day stove restorers have to say about that.  It is my understanding that the all-cast-iron ranges built in the Northeast are far easier to restore, and from the looks of what is on the internet, a lot of them have lasted pretty well.  I invite those who are much more knowledgeable than I to put their two cents worth in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

The information about the "Pin Extension Malleable Iron Water Front" on the next page explains how the Majestic waterfront provides more hot water than any other design.  The Majestic waterjacket design was certainly unique.  It had a series of circular "pins" that protruded from the top right side, thus vastly increasing the surface area where water could be heated.  Majestic used this design for many years.  I think it probably worked very well.  

I would have to say, however, that in the range where I saw one installed, I think the pins would have been in the way when trying to put larger chunks of wood in the fire.  You can sort of see the front pin sticking out over the piece of wood burning in the firebox in the photograph below.  This range was at Mill Creek Antiques in Paxico, Kansas.

This is an earlier model Great Majestic than what you see in the catalog.
You can tell that because it has the ornate "Tea Pot Shelves" that this
catalog says were unsanitary on the next page.

Following that, is the obligatory information about how wonderful the oven is.  I have yet to run across any stove brochure, flyer, or advertisement that doesn't advertise how wonderfully the oven bakes--and always on so little fuel!

The text that was cut off at the bottom of this page simply reads,
"and see for yourself."

The page below talks about the warming closet below the baking oven.  This was a feature that some New England ranges had, but in Midwestern ranges I believe it was unique to Home Comfort and the cabinet-style Majestics.  They advertise that you can dry wood and shoes down there.

And now for the pictures of the stoves!

The Great Majestic cabinet style "Square Range."

In the text boxes at the top right of each picture, you can see the different sizes that each model range came in.

The pictures on the right side always show the same Great Majestic Range
model except with legs.

I wonder how well the range in the picture below actually sold.  To me, it looks very inconvenient to operate because the only draft is located below that whole reservoir assembly!

A very similar stove to the one above is currently for sale on Ebay.  You can see it here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Great-Majestic-Stove-functional-and-new-chrome/303742237307?hash=item46b872ba7b:g:MdkAAOSwYvNfl5Wf

Ranges that were equipped with both a water reservoir and a waterfront and boiler were quite common in houses where running water had been installed.  The reservoir was most often used to heat rainwater, which was collected from the roofs of houses in cisterns.  It was valued for washing dishes, clothing, and hair because it was "soft."  In other words, it didn't have all the minerals of well water and therefore cooperated with soap better and provided better cleaning.

The waterfront and range boiler were usually connected to water systems providing well water or city water, which would be under pressure so that it could be piped throughout the home.

Combination ranges were coming into fashion during this time.  The gas side was used during warmer weather when the ability to shut the heat off as soon as cooking was finished kept the kitchen much cooler.

And now for the pie´ces de re´sistance:

Someday...someday I hope to get a chance to cook on a stove like one of these!

The largest range of this style came with three 23" x 23" ovens and weighed
in at a whopping 1740 pounds!

I would love to know how the flues in the range above were designed because the description says "One fire box will heat one, two, or three ovens, as needed, or entire top can be heated without heating the ovens."  How did that work?

According to the information here, Majestic was the largest manufacturer of hotel ranges in the world.  These ranges could be "twinned" with as many of them as were desired, thus making the long, multi-ovened beasts you see in historic photographs of places like the White House kitchen.  Man!  Cooking on one of these looks like so much fun!

So, are any of you dear readers cooking on a Great Majestic?  If so, tell us all what you think of it in the comments below.